During the 18th century, expeditions organized by the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences accumulated an enormous amount of data on the indigenous peoples of the empire. Such descriptive material, often collected by non-Russian explorers, relied implicitly on Eurocentric standards of comparison, reflecting the deep social and cultural cleavages that separated the small, educated and Westernized elites from the Russian peasantry.

Attitudes towards the peasantry’s popular culture began to change in the first decades of the 19th century. Under the influence of Herder’s ideas and of the patriotic mobilization against Napoleon, Russian intellectuals began collecting folk tales, folk songs and proverbs. Protracted debates during the 1830s and ’40s about the need for more originality and national authenticity in Russian literature also played into a Romantic quest for the recovery of national traditions; but these debates were intellectual projections rather than an outcome of actual familiarity with existing popular culture. Slavophile intellectuals idealized pre-Petrine Russia, speculated about popular religion and glorified the peasant commune (mir) as an expression of the Russian people’s inherent sense of collectivity (sobornost’), in line with the ahistorical idealizations put forward in August von Haxthausen’s Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (5 vols, 1847-52).

At the same time, the long-standing plans for the emancipation of the serfs necessitated more studies on the peasantry’s actual conditions; this left its imprint on the foundation phase of the Imperatorskoe Russkoe Geografičeskoe Obščestvo (Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 1845). The quest for a descriptive Russian Volkskunde supplanted developmental (and later evolutionary) concepts of comparative Völkerkunde in the society’s ethnographic division. Its chairman, N.I. Nadeždin (1804–1856), developed systematic questionnaires detailing the everyday lives of Russian villagers with a focus on lifestyle, byt’ (the term is derived from the Russian verb byt’, “to be”): customs, traditional crafts and material culture. Folk religion, by contrast, was largely avoided, implying a heterodox deviation from state-sanctioned Orthodoxy. Hence the study of sectarianism remained a prerogative of Church historians, although it also attracted members of the opposition intelligentsia.

In 1848, the Geographical Society’s questionnaires were distributed among the recently created statistical committees of the Russian provincial administration. Local observers acted as respondents, which expedited data collection in this vast and diverse empire. By 1853, the society had received some 2000 responses, a corpus far too large to be systematically processed by its members alone. Nonetheless, the 1850s and 1860s saw a number of smaller ethnographic studies appear in the society’s publications, such as the Etnografičeskij sbornik (“Ethnographic collection”, 1853-54) and Izvestija russkogo geografičeskogo obščestva (“Transactions of the ethnographic department of the Russian Geographical Society”, 1867-1918). These materials also served as an important resource for explorers of folk culture and fed into works like A.N. Afanas’ev’s Narodnye russkie skazki (“Russian folk tales”, 8 vols, 1855-64).

The descriptive concept of byt’ suited the development of a relatively non-hierarchical and non-developmental ethnography in imperial Russia and was applied in comparative ethnography as well. It remained dominant even when evolutionary stadialism and racial approaches entered Russian scholarly discourse in the 1880s. Evolutionary concepts influenced some left-leaning ethnographers because of their compatibility with the Marxist doctrine of stadial historical development. By contrast, anthropology as an academic discipline, intermittently institutionalized with a chair at Moscow University between 1876 and 1884, was treated with suspicion by the leading conservative and Orthodox politicians during the reign of Alexander III (1881-94). Cultural ethnography in the sense of descriptive Volks- or Völkerkunde remained the dominant paradigm in imperial Russia. New learned societies emerged in university towns such as the Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Moscow (1864) or the Society for Archeology, History and Ethnology at the University of Kazan (1878). They published their own periodicals, of which the Moscow-based Etnografičeskoe obozrenie (“Ethnographic review”, 1889-1916) was the most influential. The Russian professor of zoology and anthropology, A.P. Bogdanov, organized an anthropological exhibition in 1879.

The founding of ethnographic museums bears witness to the quick popularization of ethnographic Volkskunde, which also affected the empire’s outlying regions, e.g. in Riga (sparked off by an ethnographical exhibition in the penumbra of the Pan-Russian archeological congress of 1896) and Tallinn. Initial plans for an ethnographic museum date back to the early 19th century. It was only in 1867 that a first all-Russian ethnographic exhibition was finally held in Moscow. Many exhibits went to the Rumjancev Museum collection to form the Daškov collection, which would later be transformed into the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR. The ethnographic section of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg opened in 1902. Towards the end of the 19th century, amateur Volkskunde or regional ethnography (kraevedenie) became very popular in provincial Russia. With the kraevedčeskij muzej, a specifically Russian institution emerged, displaying a peculiar mixture of exhibits referring to ethnography, local and natural history. By 1917, between 60 and 90 were in existence across the empire.

In the twilight of imperial rule (1917), a “Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia” was set up by the Imperial Academy. The aim was to map, with linguistic, anthropometric or ethnographical methods, the minority ethnicities inhabiting the lands straddling the empire’s borders: Lithuania, Poland, Galicia, Ruthenia, Bukovina and Bessarabia, as well as the Southern Caucasus and Turkestan. Its interests and initial activities formed a stepping stone between imperial interests and post-1918 Soviet policies towards the state’s ethnic diversity.